Drawing Blood
Drawing Blood
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Welcome to Drawing Blood, the podcast about art, science, and the macabre, hosted by Emma Merkling and Christy Slobogin.
Available episodes
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Sep 25, 2023
S2 Ep6: Atheist Relics, Couples’ Cremation, and Victorian 'Infidels'
Emma and Christy look at Alfred Gilbert's sculpture Mors Janua Vitae (c. 1905–1907) at the Royal College of Surgeons, London — a life-sized bronze which houses the remains of the couple Edward and Eliza Macgloghlin. We talk relics and transi tombs; Victorian atheism and the history of unbelief; cremation, miasma, and lead-lined coffins; books bound in human skin; Victorian sex (and free love!); affairs between artists and patrons; Welsh druids; paganism; birth control and the throuple; infidel feminism; and abolishing the family.
CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE IMAGES WE DISCUSS, as well as complete show notes, references, and suggestions for further reading.
MEDIA DISCUSSED
Alfred Gilbert, Mors Janua Vitae (c. 1905–1907)
Henry Weekes, John Hunter (1864)
Etruscan couple tomb: The Sarcophagus of the Spouses (c. 530–510 BCE)
Alfred Gilbert, Mors Janua Vitae detail: panel
Alfred Gilbert, Mors Janua Vitae detail: 'baby angel'
Examples of G. F. Watts paintings: She Shall Be Called Woman (c. 1875–92); Orpheus and Euridice (exh. 1890)
Photograph of the lobby of the Royal College of Surgeons, from Artistic Possessions at the Royal College of Surgeons of England (1967)
Alfred Gilbert, plaster (and wood) version of Mors Janua Vitae, exhibited 1907
Alfred Gilbert, The Virgin (1884)
Relic example: the bones of St Valentine, Basilica of Santa Maria, Rome
Relic example: the Veil of Veronica (cloth said to have wiped Christ's face on the way to the crucifixion), Vatican version
Nineteenth-century mourning jewellery made with hair of the deceased
Case containing William Morris's hair, by Robert Catterson Smith and Charles James Fox (1896–97)
Transi tomb example from Boussu, Belgium (16th century)
Victorian garden cemeteries example: Norwood cemetery (1849)
Alfred Gilbert, Mors Janua Vitae detail: mushrooms or people?
Spiritualist painting referencing 'Mors Janua Vitae' (written on the book on the floor): Evelyn De Morgan, The Hourglass (1904)
Joseph Noel Paton, Mors Janua Vitae (1866)
Photograph of Dr William Price (1884)
Alfred Gilbert, Anteros, in Piccadilly Circus (1893)
CREDITS
This season of ‘Drawing Blood’ was funded in part by the Association for Art History.
Follow our Twitter @drawingblood_
‘Drawing Blood’ cover art © Emma Merkling
All audio and content © Emma Merkling and Christy Slobogin
Intro music: ‘There Will Be Blood’ by Kim Petras, © BunHead Records 2019. We’re still trying to get hold of permissions for this song – Kim Petras text us back!!
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Aug 28, 2023
S2 Ep5: Morphine Addiction, Decadence & Degeneration, and Fin-de-Siècle Paris
Emma and Christy use Eugène Grasset's lithograph Morphinomaniac (1897) as a starting point to talk about artistic depictions of morphine and historical opioid addiction, as well as decadence and degeneration in fin-de-siècle Parisian society. In this episode, we cover vampires, hypodermic syringes, Orientalism and Japonisme, 'dangerous' women, masturbation, pleasure, and sex work, true crime waxworks, and gendered consumption — of women, goods, and drugs.
CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE IMAGES WE DISCUSS, as well as complete show notes, references, and suggestions for further reading.
MEDIA DISCUSSED
Eugène Grasset, Morphinomaniac (1897)
Photographs of a ‘hysterical’ woman yawning at the Salpetrière from Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salpêtrière (c. 1888-1918)
Eugène Grasset, Inquiétude (1897)
Aubrey Beardsley, cover illustrations for The Yellow Book, An Illustrated Quarterly (1894)
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Divan Japonais poster (1892-93)
Bernini, detail from Rape of Proserpina (1621-22)
Edvard Munch, Vampire II (Vampyr II) (1895)
Walter Sickert, Reclining Nude (Le lit de cuivre) (c. 1906)
Examples of Parisian wax work: Death of Marat at the Musée Grévin (photograph taken 1959)
Albert Joseph Pénot, La Femme Chauve-Souris ('The Bat-Woman') (c. 1890)
Luis Ricardo Falero, Vision of Faust (1878)
Eugène Grasset, Vitrioleuse (The Acid Thrower) (1894)
Katsushika Hokusai, The Waterfall Where Yoshitsune Washed His Horse at Yoshino in Yamato Province(c. 1832)
Jules Cheret, Vin Mariani (c. 1896-1900)
Jean Bernard Restout, Morpheus (Sleep) (c. 1771)
Pablo Picasso, Waiting (Margot) (1901)
Pablo Picasso, Morphinomanes (1900)
Paul-Albert Besnard, Morphine Addicts (Morphinomanes) (1887)
CREDITS
This season of ‘Drawing Blood’ was funded in part by the Association for Art History.
Follow our Twitter @drawingblood_
‘Drawing Blood’ cover art © Emma Merkling
All audio and content © Emma Merkling and Christy Slobogin
Intro music: ‘There Will Be Blood’ by Kim Petras, © BunHead Records 2019. We’re still trying to get hold of permissions for this song - Kim Petras text us back!!
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Jul 26, 2023
S2 Ep4: Vegetal Agents, Plant-Human Entanglements, and Julia Margaret Cameron’s Photography
Emma and Christy look at Julia Margaret Cameron’s photograph 'Maud' (c. 1874) and discuss plant consciousness, agency, and erotics. In this episode, we cover tendrils and tentacles, Victorian queerness, plant horror, early ecologies, Darwin and plant sex, interspecies entanglements, photography and desire, colonial botany, tipitiwitchets, sadomasochism, and whether your houseplant can kill you.
CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE IMAGES WE DISCUSS, as well as complete show notes, references, and suggestions for further reading.
MEDIA DISCUSSED
Julia Margaret Cameron, Maud (c. 1874)
Bernini, Apollo and Daphne (1622–25); see also this detail from Rape of Proserpina (1621–22)
Julia Margaret Cameron, Illustrations to Tennyson’s ‘Idylls of the King’, and Other Poems (London: King, 1874–75)
Alfred Tennyson, ‘Maud’, excerpted by hand by Julia Margaret Cameron (1874–75)
Julia Margaret Cameron, Pomona [Alice Liddell](1872)
Anna Atkins, cyanotype from Photographs of British Algae (c. 1843–53)
Earlier Julia Margaret Cameron illustration of Maud: The Passion Flower at the Gate (c. 1865)
Julia Margaret Cameron, Charles Darwin (1868)
Charles Darwin, ‘Diagram showing the movement of the upper internodes of the common Pea, traced on a hemispherical glass and transferred to paper’ (1867)
Hokusai, The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife (1814)
Illustration from H. G. Wells’s The Flowering of the Strange Orchid (1894)
CREDITS
This season of ‘Drawing Blood’ was funded in part by the Association for Art History.
Follow our Twitter @drawingblood_
‘Drawing Blood’ cover art © Emma Merkling
All audio and content © Emma Merkling and Christy Slobogin
Intro music: ‘There Will Be Blood’ by Kim Petras, © BunHead Records 2019. We’re still trying to get hold of permissions for this song – Kim Petras text us back!!
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Mar 6, 2023
Taking a Short Break
We will be back soon with the second half of season two!
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Dec 20, 2022
S2 Ep3: Disability, Bad Horror, and M. Night Shyamalan’s ‘Old’
Emma and Christy discuss M. Night Shyamalan’s 2021 film Old. We talk about what makes good (and bad) horror; harmful representations of disability in movies, art, and society; aging and chronic illness; the history of medical experimentation; critical disability studies; and “crip time”. We may not recommend actually watching this film, but we definitely recommend thinking through some of what’s going on in it!
CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE IMAGES WE DISCUSS, as well as complete show notes, references, and suggestions for further reading.
MEDIA DISCUSSED
Old (2021)
Movie poster
Hotelier offering the secluded beach trip to the Cappa family
Mid-Sized Sedan
Corpse floating to bump into Trent Cappa
Close-up of Chrystal’s make-up streaked face as she dies
The Sixth Sense (1999)
Midsommar (2019) (see our previous episode on this film)
Get Out (2017)
Unbreakable (2020)
Split (2016)
Ann Radcliffe, Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)
The Kingsman (2014), the ‘Gazelle’ ‘super crip’ character
Poster for the Degenerate Art Exhibition of 1937
The Black Stork, 1917 film
CREDITS
This season of ‘Drawing Blood’ was funded in part by the Association for Art History.
Follow our Twitter @drawingblood_
Audio postproduction by Sias Merkling
‘Drawing Blood’ cover art © Emma Merkling
All audio and content © Emma Merkling and Christy Slobogin
Intro music: ‘There Will Be Blood’ by Kim Petras, © BunHead Records 2019. We’re still trying to get hold of permissions for this song – Kim Petras text us back!!
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Nov 7, 2022
S2 Ep2: Dollhouses of Death, Forensic Science, and Close Looking
Emma and Christy look at Frances Glessner Lee’s Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death (c. 1940s) AKA dollhouses of death. We talk Victorian children and dollplay; the origins of legal medicine; CSI as visual analysis; Barbies and buzzcuts; girlbossing on the police force; busybodies, gender, and the history of policing; class voyeurism; contemporary art and crime scene photography; Sherlock Holmes; and the afterlives of evidence.
CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE IMAGES WE DISCUSS, as well as complete show notes, references, and suggestions for further reading.
MEDIA DISCUSSED
Frances Glessner Lee, 'Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death' (VR experience) (c. 1940s)
Frances Glessner Lee, 'Living Room' and details ('Body' and 'Cigarettes') (c. 1943–48)
Frances Glessner Lee, 'Chicago Symphony Orchestra (Detail)' (c. 1930s)
Narcissa Niblack Thorne, 'Thorne Miniature Rooms' (c. 1930s)
Ben Shahn, 'The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti' (1931–32)
The Scarpetta House
Frances Glessner Lee, 'Red Bedroom' and detail (c. 1944–48)
Frames Glessner Lee, 'Parsonage Parlor' and detail (c. 1946–48)
Pre-Raphaelite painting: William Holman Hunt, 'The Awakening Conscience' (1853)
Angela Strassheim, 'Evidence (Kitchen Knife 2)' (2009)
Angela Strassheim, 'Evidence (Pistol 1)' (2009)
Angela Strassheim, 'Evidence No. 8' (2009)
Angela Strassheim, Left Behind series, 'Untitled (Horses)' (2004)
Paul Seawright, Sectarian Murder series, 'Tuesday 3rd April 1973' (1988)
Stephen Chalmers, 'Unmarked' Series (c. 2010)
CREDITS
This season of ‘Drawing Blood’ was funded in part by the Association for Art History.
Follow our Twitter @drawingblood_
Audio postproduction by Sias Merkling
‘Drawing Blood’ cover art © Emma Merkling
All audio and content © Emma Merkling and Christy Slobogin
Intro music: ‘There Will Be Blood’ by Kim Petras, © BunHead Records 2019. We’re still trying to get hold of permissions for this song – Kim Petras text us back!!
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Oct 4, 2022
S2 Ep1: The Sims 4 Paranormal, Video Games and Belief, and Alternate Worlds
Emma and Christy play The Sims 4 Paranormal ‘Stuff Pack’, exploring the game’s haunted house and séance aesthetics. We talk Victorian occult imaginaries, playing Sims as an emotional outlet, the promise of perfect capitalism, video games and affect, queer computer spaces, technopagans and cyber covens, and esoteric beliefs on the internet.
CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE IMAGES WE DISCUSS, as well as complete show notes, references, and suggestions for further reading.
MEDIA DISCUSSED
All screenshots from The Sims 4 Paranormal can be found, in order of discussion, in the image carousel on the episode page linked above.
Electronic Arts, The Sims 4 Paranormal ‘Stuff Pack’ (2021)
Jordan Peele, Get Out (2017)
Jean-Marc Vallée, Sharp Objects (2018)
Solomon J. Solomon, A Conversation Piece (1884)
The green ghost, ‘Slimer’, from: Ivan Reitman, Ghostbusters (1984)
Electronic Arts, ‘Can a computer make you cry’ advertisement (1983)
‘Miss Calendar’ from: Joss Whedon, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003)
Linden Lab, Second Life (first released 2003)
CREDITS
This season of ‘Drawing Blood’ was funded in part by the Association for Art History.
Follow our Twitter @drawingblood_
Audio postproduction by Sias Merkling
‘Drawing Blood’ cover art © Emma Merkling
All audio and content © Emma Merkling and Christy Slobogin
Intro music: ‘There Will Be Blood’ by Kim Petras, © BunHead Records 2019. We’re still trying to get hold of permissions for this song – Kim Petras text us back!!
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May 27, 2022
S1 Ep6: Human Remains in Museum Collections, Care, and Contemporary Art
Emma and Christy look at the ethics, politics, and practice of displaying human remains — from museum collections of mummies to photographs of dead bodies. We talk bog bodies, the rights of the dead, dry vs. ‘wet’ specimens, Free Renty, consent, repatriation, museums’ imperial histories, burdens of care, and how recent art — from Andres Serrano to Gala Porras-Kim — might exacerbate or enact solutions to these issues.
CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE IMAGES WE DISCUSS, as well as complete show notes, references, and suggestions for further reading. PLEASE NOTE: we have elected not to include Serrano's photographs in this carousel because they contain content viewers may find especially upsetting. To view these images, click the image link beside his name below.
OBJECTS DISCUSSED:
Gala Porras-Kim, Sunrise for 5th-Dynasty Sarcophagus from Giza at the British Museum (2022)
Photographs from the ‘Life Before Death’ exhibition by Walter Schels at the Wellcome Collection (2008)
Andres Serrano, The Morgue (select works) (1992) [GRAPHIC CONTENT WARNING]
Louis Agassiz, Renty, An African Slave (1850)
Head of Tollund Man, a bog body (from c. 375–210 BC)
Gala Porras-Kim, Sights Beyond the Grave (2022)
Gala Porras-Kim, A Terminal Escape from the Place that Binds Us (2021)
Gala Porras-Kim, Mould Extraction (2022): view one and view two
CREDITS:
‘Drawing Blood’ was made possible with funding from the Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network.
Follow our Twitter @drawingblood_
Audio postproduction by Sias Merkling
‘Drawing Blood’ cover art © Emma Merkling
All audio and content © Emma Merkling and Christy Slobogin
Intro music: ‘There Will Be Blood’ by Kim Petras, © BunHead Records 2019. We’re still trying to get hold of permissions for this song – Kim Petras text us back!!
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Apr 19, 2022
S1 Ep5: Cosmas and Damian, The Miracle of the Black Leg, and Transplant Histories
Emma and Christy explore the story of surgeon-saints Cosmas and Damian through paintings of the ‘miracle of the black leg’ from c. 1370-1495 in Italy and Spain. These pictures bring up complicated ideas around visibility and race, surgery, and historiography. In this episode, we talk Blackness in early modern Europe, organ donation and race, the long history of systemic racism in the medical system, surgeon-historians, and looking at the past from a modern perspective.
CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE IMAGES WE DISCUSS, as well as complete show notes, references, and suggestions for further reading.
IMAGES DISCUSSED:
Master of Los Balbases, A verger’s dream: Saints Cosmas and Damian performing a miraculous cure by transplantation of a leg (c. 1495)
Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors (1533)
Joan Miró, A Star Caresses the Breast of a Negress (Painting Poem) (1938)
Fra Angelico, The Healing of Justinian by Saint Cosmas and Saint Damian (c. 1438-1440)
Matteo di Pacino, St. Cosmas and St. Damian (c. 1370-1375)
Kara Walker, Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred b’tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart (1994)
Example of a 19th-century silhouette portrait: Mamma (c. 1834)
Sano di Pietro, Madonna col Bambino Angeli e Santi, Predella con Storie dei Santi Cosma e Damiano (1444)
School of Castile and Leon, Saints Cosmas and Damian Healing a Christian with a Leg of a Dead Moor (c. 1460-1480)
Image of a dark-skinned man with a white nose: From the ‘Dissertation of Noses’ in A Solution to the Question (1733)
CREDITS:
‘Drawing Blood’ was made possible with funding from the Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network.
Follow our Twitter @drawingblood_
Audio postproduction by Sias Merkling
‘Drawing Blood’ cover art © Emma Merkling
All audio and content © Emma Merkling and Christy Slobogin
Intro music: ‘There Will Be Blood’ by Kim Petras, © BunHead Records 2019. We’re still trying to get hold of permissions for this song – Kim Petras text us back!!
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Mar 18, 2022
S1 Ep4: Nationalism, Folk Horror, and the Ecopolitics of ‘Midsommar’
Emma and Christy look at Ari Aster’s 2019 folk horror film Midsommar and talk environmentalism, nationalism, community, grief, horror (obviously), folk art, facial transplants, whiteness, screaming, and IKEA.
CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE IMAGES WE DISCUSS, as well as complete show notes, references, and suggestions for further reading.
IMAGES DISCUSSED:
The camera turns upside down as the Americans enter Hälsingland
Part of the Ättestupa ritual (and the fall off the cliff)
The Hårga in their white clothing
The painting at the beginning of Midsommar
Dani as May Queen (and the famous ‘frown’)
Christian sewn into the bear suit
Dani running and choking in front of the burning building
Dani during the maypole dance
Grass growing from Dani’s hands and feet
Josh’s foot sticking out of the ground
Stig Lindberg, Melodie (1947)
Francis Bacon, Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953)
The face-smashing part of the Ättestupa ritual
Facial difference: the Hårga’s inbred oracle
A member of the Hårga wearing Mark’s face
The yellow and blue A-frame building (IKEA vibes)
CREDITS:
‘Drawing Blood’ was made possible with funding from the Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network.
Follow our Twitter @drawingblood_
Audio postproduction by Sias Merkling
‘Drawing Blood’ cover art © Emma Merkling
All audio and content © Emma Merkling and Christy Slobogin
Intro music: ‘There Will Be Blood’ by Kim Petras, © BunHead Records 2019. We’re still trying to get hold of permissions for this song – Kim Petras text us back!!
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Feb 18, 2022
S1 Ep3: Andy Warhol’s Noses, Capitalism & Race, and the Art of Plastic Surgery
Emma and Christy discuss surgical and cultural ideas embedded in Andy Warhol’s series of Before and After paintings (1961/62) of a nose job. In this episode we talk plastic surgery and big egos, the before-and-after image trope, racial typification, criminology, connoisseurship, and American consumerism and capitalism.
CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE IMAGES WE DISCUSS, as well as complete show notes, references, and suggestions for further reading.
IMAGES DISCUSSED:
Andy Warhol, Before and After [1] (1961)
Old Lady / Young Lady Optical Illusion (See also: William Ely Hill, My Wife and My Mother-in-Law (1915))
National Enquirer Ad (recurring ad; ran at least in 1961 and 1962)
Andy Warhol, Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962)
Andy Warhol, Marilyn Monroe (1967)
Andy Warhol, Before and After [2] (1961)
Andy Warhol, Before and After [4] (1962)
Example of: Jackson Pollock (1948)
Example of: Lee Krasner (1964)
Example of: Roy Lichtenstein (1964) (note his use of Ben Day dots for the girl’s…
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Jan 10, 2022
S1 Ep2: Ectoplasmic Touch, Margery Crandon, and Science in the Séance Room
Emma and Christy look at archival photographs from the séances of Mina 'Margery' Crandon (around 1925) and talk slimy protrusions, sex, scientific photography, the testing of mediums, and the science of spiritualism.
CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE IMAGES WE DISCUSS, as well as complete show notes, references, and suggestions for further reading.
IMAGES DISCUSSED:
Will Conant, Untitled (Ectoplasmic Hand Emerging from Margery's Navel) (1925)
The Belvedere Torso (1st century BC)
William Hunter, 'Table 6' in The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus Exhibited in Tables (1774)
Baron von Schrenck Notzing, 'Flashlight Photograph [of Eva Carrière]' (1911) in Phenomena of Materialisation (1913)
Will Conant, Untitled (Ectoplasmic Hand Emerging from Margery's Navel and Resting on Eric Dingwall's Hand) (1925)
[Photographer unknown], Untitled (Margery in a Trance During a Séance) (c. 1925)
Carolee Schneemann, Interior Scroll (1975)
[Photographer unknown], Untitled (Margery Under Control: Neck S…
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Dec 1, 2021
S1 Ep1: Severed Breasts, Lee Miller, and Surrealist Photography
Emma and Christy look at Lee Miller’s photographs Untitled (Severed Breast from Radical Surgery in a Place Setting I) and (II) (c. 1929) and talk about double mastectomies, fragmented bodies, feminist(?) art, Georges Bataille… and recipes for ‘cauliflower breasts’.
CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE IMAGES WE DISCUSS, as well as complete show notes, references, and suggestions for further reading.
IMAGES DISCUSSED:
Lee Miller, Untitled (Severed Breast from Radical Surgery in a Place Setting I) (c. 1929)
Lee Miller, Untitled (Severed Breast from Radical Surgery in a Place Setting II) (c. 1929)
Man Ray, Anatomies (1929)
Man Ray, Indestructible Object or Object to Be Destroyed (1923, remade 1933, editioned replica 1965)
Man Ray, Observatory Time: The Lovers (1932)
Roland Penrose, Lee Miller with Body Cast, known as ‘Bewitches Witch’ (1942)
Man Ray, Minotaur (1933)
Man Ray, The Return to Reason(1923)
Photograph by Edward Steichen, Lee Miller in a Kotex ad (1928)
Jo Spence, Pr…
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Oct 29, 2021
S1 Ep1: Intro: Drawing Blood
Emma and Christy introduce ‘Drawing Blood’, a podcast about art, science, and the macabre.
‘Drawing Blood’ was made possible by funding from the Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network. Follow our Twitter @drawingblood_ or visit our website at https://drawingbloodpod.wordpress.com/.
Audio postproduction by Sias Merkling.
'Drawing Blood' cover art © Emma Merkling.
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